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Friday, 11 January 2013

Heroes of Fire

William Flavel (1779-1844)
Working at the Leamington iron foundry established by his father,
William introduced the 'Kitchener', the first all-in-one cooker with
ovens, hotplate and grill, and wrote extensively on the theory of heat
and the construction of fireplaces.Charles Portway
In the 1830's Charles Portway took inspiration from the enclosed metal
stoves which had appeared in North America, and built his own version to
heat his Halstead ironmongery store. The design proved so successful
that a neighbouring shopkeeper asked Portway to build a stove to heat
his store too. Portway set up a foundry to produce his 'Tortoise' stoves
under the slogan 'Slow But Sure' - so successful they lasted up to the
1980’s almost without change.

It was the first heating appliance to offer fuel efficiency as a major
selling point, so that Robert Higgs, the chief executive of the Heating
and Ventilating contractors association argues the Portway was the
“founding father of energy efficiency”. Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
The inventor of all inventors, Franklin was responsible for popularising
the earliest of metal stoves, the 'Pennsylvania Fireplace' - an open
fire in a five-panel cast-iron casing which could stand in the middle of
the room and so radiate heat in all directions.
Franklin's own version of the design passed the hot gases through a
labyrinthine heat exchanger at the back of the fire, extracting so much
heat that upward momentum was lost and the appliances smoked badly. It
took David R. Rittenhouse, another hero of early Philadelphia, to
improve Franklin's design by adding an L-shaped exhaust pipe that drew
air through the furnace and vented its smoke into a brick chimney. Jacob Bronowski (1908 - 74)
Polish mathematician, philosopher, polymath and expounder of science and
art in The Western Intellectual Tradition and the BBC series The Ascent
of Man, Bronowski was also research director of the UK National Coal
Board, where he was substantially responsible for the development of the
'Homefire' process to remove smoke from bituminous coal.